My new diet
We selected the Queen Victoria (the little sister of the Queen Mary) for the Greek Isles Group, leaving On October 31, 2010 out of Venice and going to Rome. I am not allowed to write about the group rates, but the 12-day trip on this luxury ship starts well below $ 2000 for inside cabins and a little above that for a balcony with obstructed view per person. Flights from Tampa are currently starting at about $ 900 for the flight to Venice and back from Rome. Let me know if you like to join us. The Queen Mary 2 is my favourite ship and I really look forward checking out the Queen Victoria.
I am starting with my diet, I had success before with the South Beach Diet, but with a twist - I grant myself a vacation each week from the diet. It still works and it is much easier to follow.
Ilove food and wine, My wife and I love to entertain - and we love to travel. Therefore a cruise fits pretty good what we like.
The problem with my love for food and wine is that I have to loose some weight. I want to loose some weight until May 1 that I look great when walking my daughter down the isle on her wedding day. That gives me the motivation to go on the South Beach Diet again and I have scheduled it to begin on February 9, 2010. Nine years ago, when my wife gave me a huge Viking gas grill for my 50th birthday, we went for about half a year on the Atkin's Diet. That worked out pretty fine, but we slowly gained weight again after we left the diet.
Why do most diets fail? Because you do not like to stay on. Therefore when we started on the South Beach Diet in 2005, we made one important chage to the diet - we grant a vacation once a week for two days. It is much easier to stay on a diet for a long time, when you do not have to do it all the time.
How does our changed diet look like?
For Breakfast, we always have two eggs, nothing more, nothing less, only two cups of strong black coffee (life starts after the second cup of coffee).
Here we have only very few exeptions, even after we discontinued the diet three years ago. NO bread and NO organge juice is very important. One exeption is Valetines day I will prepare for my wife a nice breakfast with French bread, smoked salmon, and a glass of bubbly (or two) just after we come back from church. Sometimes we break the diet Sundays after church when we go for breakfast with friends.
For Lunch we usually try just to have some salad and cold meat (leftovers from the night before as I am usually grill too much) or fish (tuna or salmon in a can or sardines). We just add a very easy to make dressing of virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar (Costco offers a great balsamic vinegar in 1 L bottles for around ten dollars).
For Dinner we often grill on my gas grill some meat or seafood and have some salad or vegetables.
NO alcohol during most diet days, only on the two vacation days + one of the diet days we can have two glasses of red wine.
When we have lost the weight we want, we will relax the diet even more and allow us some fruit and a glass of wine every evening. To allow the fruit means usually that we eat some fresh berries and also eat yocurt that we make with berries (we taw frozen berries in the microwave), add the yocurt and pomgranate juice. This is a fast and healty lunch.
What do we change compared to the official South Beach Diet?
Two days a week we grand us a vacation from the diet. There are events at the chambe of commerce, or at church, or an invitation from a friend where it would be difficult or impossible to follow the diet. It is no problem if you are going to a steak house, like Outback, where you eat a steak and vegetables and have a salad before. SKIP the bread and NO beer, not even during Happy Hour, where you get two for the price of one. If we want to have some bread or French fries or beer, we count that day as a diet vacation day. Usually we take this vacation for the weekend, if nothing else is scheduled.
On the vacation days we drink wine or beer, eat pasta (that is what I am missing on the diet) or potatoes, rice dnd whatever carb we want. So life is good even when dieting. You need a vacation to relax every year, so does your diet!!!!
Beginning Tuesday I will report my weight and what I am eating and I will provide the recipes. I believe you will see that dieting can mean gourmet food also.
Christian Bellingrath